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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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What's New? (28 Sept, 2007)

New PAL releases.

COMPUTER NERDS TAKE OVER STREETS

Fleet Street, 26th September -- This week literally dozens of poorly dressed, sexually frustrated young men probably with skin disorders will climb out of their bedrooms and go down the shops for what is being described as the videogame event of the year.

We sent Daily Daily technology correspondent Rufus McElectricity to investigate.

"I am standing on a street. It could be any street in the country that has a games shop on it. Outside there are lots of people cowering from the sun and helping you to feel better about that boil on your thigh because they have eight on their face.

"Amazingly, one of them is a girl, Makesy McBettercopy, a 28-year-old girl from London. Surprisingly, she is a girl. Like so many others, except she is a girl, she is queuing for the launch of Microsoft Nintendo game Halo 3. Despite being a girl, she says she has no problems being a girl in such a macho setting.

"Hundreds of people from a broad range of social and economic backgrounds make up the crowd outside the shop, so we spoke to Johnny McSpam, a 34-year-old, overweight systems programmer from Slough, who looked as though he picked his nose.

"However, he put up a reasonable defence so instead we spoke to Jill McOtherwoman, the store manager at a nearby Starbucks, who was surprised to discover that there was a girl queuing to buy a computer game given that computer games are very antisocial and only fat ugly men play them.

"Microsoft, the company behind Halo 3, has described the launch of Halo 3 as the biggest entertainment event of the year, citing side by side revenue projections, pre-order receipts and widespread mainstream acceptance. We sat down with one of their executives and asked whether it was only fat ugly men with spots who live in their parents' basements who played games.

"At midnight, the shop doors opened and everyone bought the game, but we weren't there because we had gone to a party with a couple of people from Big Brother. We asked Chanelle/Chantelle/whichever one it was whether they would ever play a game or if they were put off by the fact that they are very antisocial and that only fat ugly men with spots play them."

[Continues on page 72 in the space below all the stories about how we don't know where Madeleine McCann is.]

This week: